How They are Saved by Half a Man
by Syntipathy
Summary: The restored Shepard is a tangle of machine and man. What part of him is real? What of his memories? What of his growing dissociation and sociopathy? Strange, violent and disturbing. Be warned.  Rewritten, now up to date
1. Yeshua and Lazarus

**(Mass Effect belongs to BioWare. I'm not BioWare)

* * *

**

_You will understand these pieces better than I can._

_A fragment cannot appreciate the whole._

_I am the barest element of man._

**Prologue:**

**Yeshua (what he saw)**

**Earth Children**

We can be had for less than the price of a beer. It is not only men that partake: there are women concealed in delicate detox suits. There are transgenders and ungenders and mergers, all of them debased and hungry.

Earth has become a world of abandoned children and the predators of the young. We assemble in clans in the valleys of urban ruin beneath the planet's gleaming Uppermost. We price ourselves and our parts. We understand full well the commodity of unsullied youth.

**Foundations**

The gang sleeps naked in undifferentiated mass within the shadows of a well-hidden complex. I am among them, thin and scarred and ageless, twisting and dreaming. I have become their leader by some violent rite.

I soothe my welts and inflammations against the warmth of one flesh and the coolness of another.

You may imagine blind couplings and fitful, frustrated emissions. I am beginning my empire, sowing its seeds in this polity of flesh.

I am fashioning an armour. I am fashioning a sword.

**The Shadow in the Heart of the World**

After a riot there are bodies strung up from lanternposts. Others are struggling against their own shrinking strength in the street. Soldiers are among them like crows or dogs, seeking survivors for unknowable ends.

The sidewalks and soaring storeys are filled with passionless onlookers. A pantheon of same-faced gods, this throng of welfare tribalists..

My gang are concealed among that spectatorial crowd, making thefts and propositions. It is a gathering and all gatherings are opportunities.

**Possessions**

The fee has not been paid and the man struggles with the weight of the girl. His face is flush with frustration and anticipated delight. In the alleyway amid ventilated waste and ash I seem an apparition.

_What's it you want boy?_

The man is managing the girl with the same hand that is busy at the belt of his trousers. In his other hand is the pistol, ancient and half-alive with murmuring light. There is something strange in me. Growing, though seeming still.

_Fuck is it you want? Some of this? You can't have it._

But she is mine. I am to become a king, and this is the power of kings...

The pistol turns and forces the man's arm to turn, unbidden, curling as a serpent does upon its tail. It smiles a glowing smile, and sings.

**Reigning in Hell**

In my dream I am dismembered at every joint and consumed. The eaters, my gang, are filled with my power. They are burning and breaking and mauling the throngs of stale-eyed men and limp-faced women, our nameless mothers and forgotten fathers.

They are eating the whole earth.

Perhaps it will not be a dream. But I will not share myself among them.

**The House He Forsook**

A solitary banner is strung across the doorway so that I must bow my head to enter. The banner says ENLIST. The woman at the desk smiles and proffers a stylus and input pad.

She has never met me and she is promising me eternity.

I will make my empire among distant worlds. I will fashion a better sword. I will fashion a better armour.

**The Shadow that Enfolds Creation**

There was a column of pure light that tore me from my shell and delivered me to the stars.

The children called my name as if in desperate invocation of a falling god.

I am tumbling and turning toward an unfamiliar world.

**Chapter One:**

**Lazarus (what it said)**

_A helix traces in three dimensions the constant circuit of a circle. It is a perfect symmetry distended and unravelled across time._

That is his first thought and he is certain it is not his own. Someone is inside thinking with him. For him. In lieu of him.

He imagines that he is the first of all trees before the first of all rains. This thought of circuit and symmetry... it is his rain. He is so greedy for awareness that he does not pause to wonder if is is true.

He finds that he has a mind. It is multipartite and shining. He feels he is no part of it.

_Wake up, Commander._


	2. Advent

**Chapter Two:**

**Advent**

_**Soil**_

_You're kidding. It's too early and we have no precedent for that degree of isolation._

_We don't need him conscious yet. But active memory, recollections, are essential._

_This could do lasting psychological damage-_

_He'll be fine._

_How in the hell can you know that?_

_Remember who you're talking to._

_I am. It sounds more insane coming from you._

_It is insane. We're bringing a man back from the dead._

_Ha. Bloody ha ha._

**Jonathan**

There's no explaining a boy like Jonathan. How he is made. Dad stayed home and watched the vids with him after school. He didn't bring strumpets home unless the boy was out with friends. He collected his checks without a fuss and he always kept curfew. The boy didn't have a mum but there were enough good women in his life that he never noticed and wasn't envious of the other kids.

Until he was six you could almost call him normal, except maybe he laughed a little too eagerly, at things no one else would ever think was funny, and there were times when he would just stand staring at his feet and if you asked him _What's wrong Jonny?_ he would scream at you _BE QUIET_ because something really important was about to happen and he just couldn't miss it. If he was crazy there was nothing Dad could do about it. The Security didn't cover psychiatrics and there was no legal way to make the money. But Dad didn't think he was crazy.

Still, there was something in the boy. He had a way of talking, a certain emphasis that was far from childlike. When he gestured it was like he was grasping, clutching or clawing at something. The air? The world itself? Sometimes grownups would stop and watch him with the other children. The kids listened so intently, and even if he was only saying what little boys are supposed to say, about space and aliens and dreams of freedom, parents didn't want their kids around him. This was very confusing for Jonathan.

There is another thing. He was sitting in front of the vid watching edutainments well past his bedtime, while Dad slept on the mattress beside him with the heavy, welcome smell that Jon F. Shepard will never forget and still smiles at even though they tell him he hasn't got a soul. On the screen were marching men and women in plainclothes and starships filled with sleeping children. There were beautiful blue women and snarling men with folded-up faces. Because there was no volume he was making up the commentary in his head.

He watched the vid for a long time, rewinding it over and over. After he'd watched it maybe thirty times his nose began to bleed and the screen flickered out and cracked in half. In the morning he told Dad that something on the vid had upset him and he'd thrown a toy at it. Jonathan didn't have any toys that were heavy enough, but Dad didn't point this out.

People who knew a little about Jonathan sometimes said it was his fault Dad fell in with the Workmen and started fighting the Security. _The boy was twisted first,_ they said, _and he twisted the father._ Maybe Dad did do it because of Jonathan, but only because Dad had really cared and there was nothing else he could think of that might help.

Dad got shot in a riot. A rubber bullet went into his eye and wrecked his brain and Jon couldn't live in an invalid's care so they put him in a common house where you couldn't shit without five other boys watching you. Jon walked out on the second night, breaking the locks as he went, and when a guard cornered him just before the exit he smashed the man's ribcage out of reflex. _I didn't mean to do it. Please don't try to keep me here._ The man sort of wriggled there, trying to gasp, and they shared a look of mutual incomprehension. Jonathan took the man's gun. It was humongous in his own tiny hands.

**_Seed_**

_If you're not going to tell me what this is at least tell me where we got it._

_That's no more relevant than your last question._

_It isn't from earth._

_Miranda._

_It isn't from earth and we didn't get it from humans. We're trading on xenotech now, is that it? Letting them solve our problems?_

_Spare me your infant posturing. You're going to do it and we're wasting valuable time._

**Fawkes**

It was very, very cold outside. The London citytowers filled the whole world with their shadows. The sky was full of the flare and flash of suspended motorways and endless drifting detritus that was lit up in a thousand pallid pinks by the slow infiltration of the dawn. The street was filled with people wearing heavy jackets or soft green suits that clung so that they seemed nearly naked. They had clunky respirators and bulky rebreathers, and darkly reflecting goggles perched on or above their blinking eyes.

There weren't any kids here. The jostle of the crowd made no allowance for the delicacy of a child's movement. Jon was thrown about. Many times a gloved hand, rough or silky, oiled or greased or gleaming immaculate, grabbed at him from somewhere out of sight. If anyone spoke to him he didn't notice. He moved downhill because it was easier to fall with the crowd than rise with it. He fell toward Old London.

Jonathan was seven years old and skinny and empty-eyed. He had a big pistol underneath his shirt but he didn't know how to use it, didn't even know the safety was still on. On the first day two older boys jumped on him, one holding his arms and pulling him into an alley while the other tried to snatch his feet. He kicked the one in front very hard in the testicles, then again in the head when he fell over. He pulled the other one to the ground and wrestled with him, and bit his face until he could taste his flesh and blood then headbutted him maybe four times. Only when he'd risen and they didn't get up after him did he make any sound other than the quiet hiss of struggle. It was the low growl of a dog that speaks no triumph, only wordless warning. He walked out of the alley and spat out the boy's blood. It was midday, and no-one noticed.

Old London is compressed with the weight of its strangling straddling daughter, who swallows her mother up with the pale weight of herself and her torrential bourgeois wastes. Old London is fat and sick with the moneyless millions; the poor, yes, but the welfare proles in far greater profusion. The Security ensures that few will starve in England and that few in turn have the right or the strength to feed themselves. The frailest, the hungriest, the most hurt and hateful of that queer regime all come to Old London. Jonathan kept fighting and falling deeper into that place, falling toward its heart. He knew there was something really important there he just couldn't miss.

Late on the sixth night he found the spot where the long descent ended as the broad street curved upward again in parabola. Not, it seemed, against the force of gravity but against the weight of the city's dissolution. Running parallel to the broad - and now quite forlorn - street was an equally broad canal, many yards deep and empty of water save a still black stream that snaked a course along its bottom and stank like rot. _Hidden in such canals as this are Old London's tribes of abandoned and runaway children. They are savage and paranoid. They have ruined bodies and wrecked minds._ Jon climbed down a ruined section of wall and went to sleep beneath an arching bridge whose middle had collapsed. None of the children nearby came to him but they watched from down the stream where there were plastic shacks and tattered one-poled tents, and manmade hollows and echoing pipes where a child might make her bed.

He rose before sunrise and pissed in the water and climbed back onto the street. The grownups were numerous, but slow moving, and they kept a cautious distance as though each was in conspiracy against all. Perhaps it was so. There was an ancient street vendor selling fat oily pastries nearby. He had a big metal club hanging from a hook. Jonathan had come upon some money so he decided to buy some food.

_You're new._

_Yes sir._

_And polite._

_Yes sir._

_What's your name?_

Jonathan said nothing further and the man took his money and gave him the pastry. Jon wanted to take it somewhere and savour it but he wasn't stupid. He ate it all right there, under the vendor's lamplight, then climbed back down to the stinking stream. In the dawn dark the other children were stirring. Half-awake they yowled and cajoled and scuffled together. Many of them were naked, both boys and girls. Jon squatted like a frog and observed and they became uneasy with his gaze.

Finally a short boy with blonde hair who was missing half his teeth parted with the crowd and stalked toward him. He looked mean and searching. The boy stood over Jon and stared for a few piercing seconds, then dealt him a heavy kick to the chest. Jon fell on his arse, didn't get up, didn't retaliate. _Fuck off._ Jon sat there and looked at nothing in particular. The boy kicked him again and he fell on his back. He gazed at the gritty bricks of the bridge. Scuttling things in the shadow of its underside. _Fuck off or you die._ Jon thought about sleeping children in starships, slipping away into space. The boy stalked away again.

When he woke up it was afternoon and there weren't many kids around. There was a man and a woman talking to a pair of pretty looking girls about as young as himself. All four of them laughed. The woman had money which the girls took as they started to undress. Jon spat. He climbed back up to the street.

Now it was loud and busy. There were people dressed every sort of way, speaking every kind of language. They had wide umbrellas stained grey with filth and many wore beautiful masks or full, velvety hoods. There were also the shuffling vagrants from before but they were like ghosts among this novel crowd. There were the children, too, the creatures from the toxic canal now painted up and prancing, seeming youthful, almost human.

He walked for an hour in the direction he had originally been going and the exotic throng was endless. The buildings were tall and toppling, with ramshackle storeys built atop sagging stone levels. There were flags flying from a hundred different countries, and the flags of contentious ideologues, and many other uncouth banners. Ugly men stood guard at entryways, from which there came music and singing and screaming, and sweet scents and spices, and staggering men with bleeding bellies or satisfied smiles. Sometimes a lady or gentleman would stand before him or rap his shoulder expertly. _Are you selling?_ He knew what they meant but he'd look at them stupidly. They'd move on and so would he.

At one point the crowds grew suddenly quiet, and the roads, busy with peddlers and pedestrians and leering pederasts, quickly emptied. Men in shining black suits with silver helmets and long rifles came marching down the street. They glared eyelessly, this way and that. Jon decided he'd travelled as far as he should that day and walked back toward the bridge.

He woke late that night with the blond boy kneeling on his chest. The boy had a knife in his hand, short and with a swooping curve like an eagle's beak. He pressed its point into the softness beneath Jon's jaw. At least twenty of the kids from downriver were surrounding him, a respectable distance away, and nobody made a sound. _Gonna fuck you,_ the boy said plainly. _Gonna fuck you and I'm gonna kill you._

Jon snatched the boy's wrist. He wasn't strong enough to pull the hand away. He punched the boy with his other hand, aiming at his nose but striking his cheek as the boy leant in with a blow of his own. They locked hands and struggled quietly and the blonde put more weight on Jon's chest. Someone he couldn't see had hold of his pantlegs and was pulling them off. He didn't fight that but as soon as his legs were free again he kicked whoever it was as fiercely as he could and they cried out. Now he knew what they were going to do to him he knew what he was going to do to them. In the back of his head was a patter of sound like faraway rain. The boy's wrist snapped and whipped loosely around and drove the knife into the side of his own neck. He fell sideways, gushing and thrashing.

Jon pulled the knife out and stood up. The one, the girl, was crawling away slowly but no-one moved to help her so he kicked her again in the back of the head and pushed her into the water with his foot. The children backed away toward their campfires. The boy wasn't moving anymore, though he was breathing very faintly amid the dwindling spurts of blood. Jon was suddenly very tired. He lay down again, staring at the sky's featureless black. He didn't sleep.

_**Sun**_

_I said this would happen._

_Nothing more than we expected._

_You keep saying 'we'. These would be the xeno friends you keep neglecting to mention._

_Your petulance is far from endearing._

_And your obscurantist bullshit is far from fucking useful._

_This is how it always works. Did you expect preferential treatment? A maternity manual, perhaps?_

_I expected..._

_I know. That's why it has to be you. Finish the restoration and get some sleep._

_Sleep. Right._

**Shepard**

Left utterly to their own devices, the kingdoms of the young reflect the empires of the old: they are governed by the law of human desire, which is unvarying in all the world. It is when confined in the shadow of adulthood, oppressed yet without guidance, that the lunacy of youth transcends maturity's familiar madness.

Jonathan kept waiting for the dead boy to stand up in the grim red firelight, for the girl to rise out of the water's filth, and he knew that if they did they'd somehow have swallowed a measure of his strength, becoming monstrous with it. In his weakened state he didn't know he could fight them again. But they didn't get up. The children dragged the girl's body out in the morning but nobody came near him to get the boy. Eventually an older boy approached him.

_Got to move him if we want customers. Nobody fucks with a corpse around._

Jon shrugged. The boy stood there looking severely discomfited.

_Got a name?_

_Shepard._

_S'your real one?_

_Fuck off._

They could hear grownups calling from above. Solicitations and the occasional empty threat.

_This bridge... usually we done it here 'cos there's less light._

_Not anymore you don't. This is my bridge._

_We'll cover him up then._

_Fuck you will._

The boy's face darkened. _How it is yeah?_

_How it is._

The boy walked away. Jonathan crouched over the corpse and peered into its staring eyes. They were a cold and beautiful blue. He thought that if he looked long and hard enough he'd find the piece of himself the boy had stolen.

_Aw for fucks sake._

Two masked men leaned out from the street above.

_That bugger dead?_

_And him staring in his eyes like that. Lost my bloody hardness._

The men disappeared back into the street. John squatted there like a dog guarding a haunch of meat. He hardly moved all day, despite a gnawing hunger and the pressing need to shit, because had a point to prove and the children would have to come to him for the lesson. Some bloke was at it with a girl the next bridge along, grunting over her little shape while a pair of tall boys watched from a few yards away. The man looked up at one point and saw John, staring distant and dispassionate, and stopped. One of the boys spoke with visible irritation and the man resumed. Then the two boys glared at Jon.

Eventually he had to feed and relieve himself so he climbed up and joined the crowd and found a secluded place to settle his bowels. He spent the last of his money on some fruit. When he got back the body was gone, of course, but nobody was at sport in the shadows. He settled again and waited.

He didn't wait long. There were five of them, all older and quicker and calmer than the one he'd killed. He was hardly aware of them now because the rain in his head had been incessant these last four hours. For reasons he couldn't explain to you however hard he tried, the five boys looked terribly ridiculous and he began to laugh uproariously.

Afterwards he tried to remember when he'd struck with his body or only with his mind. There was a lot of blood coming out so he must have gone too far. Keeping his sleeve pressed against his frothing nose, he brought his face very close to that of a semiconscious victim. He wasn't sure yet if the boy would get to live but he'd tell him the message anyway. Jon whispered to the boy for a long time, until his half-closed eyes glazed over and Jon no longer felt his breath in his hair

_**Rain**_

_There was more. We need the last of it. The end of that record is key._

_That's where it ends. If I could look at the data myself I could compare it to other sequences-_

_That isn't happening._

_Then that's all you'll get. We had to sacrifice pertinent sequences in order to preserve combat records, biotic coordination-_

_You don't have to make excuses. What about later memories?_

_They'll come. When he remembers them, you'll get them._

_If he remembers them._

_If they're as important as you say, he'll remember._

_Then wake him up._

_He's only-_

_Sixty-three percent is more than sufficient. Wake him up._

**Shepherd**

Mockingly they would call him Little Emperor. They wouldn't say it to his face or within earshot of his tribe. They said it when they went highup, where the children didn't go, where there were no tribes and London wasn't so visibly foul. When they were in Old London he was called Shepard, _the_ _Shepherd_, nevermind that his flock had all been pubescent sluts and killers and wore the skin of wolves.

He was fourteen, perhaps fifteen. Tall, lean, scarred all over like a pitdog. He had beautiful green eyes and tangled brown hair. There was something wrong with him, they said. But what? He was calm and gently moving. He once dragged another boy through the street by a chain and kept on dragging until the boy was dead, and that took a very long time.

The men said he should be marching with proper lads now. He should stop playing with kids because there was a real war on: the war of desperate London men who remembered the days before the endless Security, days when a fellow could work if he chose. But there was no work and it was a pointless war. What use are your ransoms and bombs when the earth itself is made trivial?

Shepard lived beneath a bridge, beneath the streets, under the shining New London. His tribe were strange like him, but the way his shadow is like him. They were bound and made to dance as he danced. He had some kind of wonderful power. It often made him cruel, made him ravenous like the worst of their mothers and fathers, and sometimes they hated him for it. But in the end they knew he was good. He was an angel.


	3. Nativity

**Chapter Three:**

**Nativity**

**Wakening**

Her father always paced when deep in thought, but in an unusual fashion. He would select a nearby object and, imagining a distant and invisible perimeter around it, begin marching back and forth along that unseen circumference like a planet caught in queer vacillations around its mother sun. Miranda had the preposterous memory that when she was very tiny, not yet even a foetus, he had stalked around her little incubator in this fashion, ponderously and pendulously, watching her grow.

Miranda was pacing now as he had paced, and she pondered, and she vacillated. She paused and glanced at the incubation chamber. It was much larger than her own had been, but full of the same rose-red amnion which she dimly remembered from the later days of her gestation. _A monster's womb, and inside... _She paced again. She glanced now at the readouts on the monitor, then compared them with her Omnitool's own calculations. She tried desperately hard not to look at the growing man as he slept. Or perhaps drifted in some narcotic pantomime of sleep: his brain had already been awake for months.

"How close?" she said. She could read the data clear enough but she needed to hear a sound other than her own footsteps, and the monastic hum of the station's ventilation, and the chirp of Shepard's dreaming heartbeat.

"An hour," said Wilson. "And a half, maybe."

"It's taking too long."

"It's taking as long as it should."

"These callosal exchanges, here and here-"

"There's nothing wrong with his CC. There's nothing wrong at all."

Wilson looked somewhat amused. He leaned back in his chair and tapped his lower lip with his stylus. Sharpe and Tiller listened unobtrusively from their respective corners of the lab. They kept to their tasks, but Miranda's anxiety was growing in them as well, and they slowed, checking their data with a new and discomfited scrutiny.

Miranda had watched the man in the incubator for countless days and truly uncountable hours. When they first brought the macabre salvage of his carcass to this chamber and interred it in the first solution it had seemed a ghoul of ancient folklore, raw and seeping and hideous. You could see how it had been human; it had a head and four limbs, and the wasteland of its midriff held some suggestion of spine and rib and viscera. But only with determination could you dream of how it might be made so again.

This Miranda had done, and with the unending months of labour she had felt the rising of an unnameable power within herself. Her father must have felt something much like this. A strength, not like God's, but in the proper service of God. _For if we are truly in his image then are we not also the creators of men?_ Dad's own words.

Through all that time it had been easy enough to imagine that the tests, the protocols and rigid strictures that had so comfortably defined the manner of Shepard's creation, would also serve in the management of his reawakened humanity. He was only human. He would have frailties and pressures. He could be guided to his purpose. But now when Miranda looked at Shepard she saw how he no longer floated in the huddled ellipsis of an unborn child, vulnerable and needing their protection. Now he was upright, upraised as if ascending heavenward, and his eyes beneath their lids were ever-stirring.

He was long and lean and devoid of his prior lifetime's scars. He wasn't particularly muscular, but even in the atrophy of disuse his body spoke utility, easy motion, even grace. His hair was growing slowly - there was little on his head and none elsewhere so that his chest, his arms, his manhood all seemed those of an adolescent - but he was no child. Some wouldn't even call him human. Miranda knew his past too well to read innocence in his flesh, or a benediction in his quiet smile.

"He's close."

"How close now?"

"We could d-synch right away if you like."

"No. Bring him in slowly."

Wilson nodded. He brought up the relevant screen and entered the passcode and the desired recalibration levels. Then he breathed in long and deep. He looked at Miranda, and at Tiller and Sharpe. He breathed out again and thumbed an icon in the corner of the monitor.

Shepard's movement began with a steady arching back, and the languid sideward rolling of his head. He raised his arms casually forward, a bent-elbowed, almost balletic gesture, and when he felt the surrounding glass he pressed all ten of his fingertips against it. Then he raised his knees and likewise pressed his toes against the glass. He rested there. Or perhaps he was poised, ready to thrust against the ceramic and shatter his way free. The glass was incredibly strong but he seemed so peacefully confident that Miranda suddenly felt very, very uncomfortable.

"Can he hear us?" she asked Tiller.

"He should. Try and see." Tiller's expression said she wasn't enthusiastic to find out.

"Commander Shepard." There was stillness, for ten brutalising seconds. Shepard opened his eyes. "You won't be able to speak but if you can understand me, nod your head."

He didn't nod his head. Instead he brought his gaze in a long leftward sweep, scanning the wide room, then again to the right. He looked at each of them in turn. His eyes settled on Tiller.

"Language centres normal," said Sharpe. "He understands what you're saying."

Miranda made another attempt. "Commander Shepard. If you can understand me, nod your head."

He tilted his head ever so slightly to the right, almost birdlike. He blinked.

There was an eruption of light from one of the terminals as it tore free and wailed and sparked with horrible speed across the floor. It pinned Tiller to the wall by her legs and she screamed and vomited and kept on screaming. Wilson jumped to his feet and went for the door. Sharpe reached for his service pistol as the chair of his own desk flew upward and collided with his jaw in a spray of blood. He fell to the floor.

"Don't bloody move!" Miranda cried. Wilson stopped. "Sharpe and Tiller were armed. He'll think you're going for help and take you out as well." She turned back to Shepard. He was perfectly still.

"Wilson."

"Fuck. What?"

"How's Tiller?"

"Unconscious now. Legs are pretty bad."

"Sharpe?"

"Likewise. Unconscious, I mean. Shame about the face."

Miranda steeled herself. The creature adrift before her seemed so terribly calm. "Commander. We are trying to heal you, not harm you. I think we can agree that right now you're more of a danger to us than the reverse."

Shepard nodded at last. He closed his eyes, pushed off gently with hands and feet and slowly receded into the carmine dark of his chamber.

_**streamB3-r-N11**_

_The space shuttle was very small, with curving cream-coloured interior walls and no windows. The ceiling was a holoscreen. On it were images of strange black roses stretching and twining their thorny stems around the cribs of crying babies, or of towers swallowed whole by cockroaches, and other outlandish things. The images were never repeated as they paraded from one end of the screen to the other. There was no cycle, and seemingly no reason._

_There were only four seats and all were occupied. Jonathan sat behind and to the right. Beside him was a thin woman with drawn features and pockmarked skin. She was conversing quietly with the broad, bald man in front of him; the back of the man's skull was tattooed with a single eye, but the eye was blinking and sometimes twitched this way or that, so that it seemed he belonged on the holoscreen, among that cavalcade of reasonless wonders._

_The fourth passenger was a very dark-skinned young man. His hair hung in long curls, and he wore a patternless white scullcap. Every once in a while he'd glance over his shoulder at Jonathan and smile. It was an honest and friendly smile, something Jonathan wasn't used to yet._

_**analysisB3-r-N11**_

_Those images._

_He doesn't focus on them often. There's very poor retention on peripheral imagery._

_Just get me what you can._

_Will you want I.D on the passengers?_

_No need. I know them. They're all dead._

**Whispering**

In Miranda's dream her sister came into her bed. She was covered in blood and cradled Father's severed head in her arms. Miranda cried. "Why have you done this? Now I can't finish you! I can't save you." Oriana stroked Father's grizzled hair. "I never wanted to be born. None of us should have been born. Don't you see that?" She wasn't talking to Miranda. She was talking to the dead man, whose eyes were pale and unresponsive.

Miranda woke in the dark. Her chest was burning, and heaving, but a large and comforting hand enfolded her own. She had wrestled free of the bedsheets in her fitful sleep. The wan silver of simulated moonlight was reflected in her nakedness, and in the suggestion of the other shape, Jacob's shape, resting assuredly beside her. He gazed at her with eyes both black and bright.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be. Every soldier knows bad dreams."

"I'll let you get back to sleep." She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She didn't turn on the light. The shower was cool, the hiss of water meditative. She leaned her head back and let the water run into her mouth.

Tomorrow they would drain the chamber and Shepard would breath and speak for the first time. They had spent an entire month ensuring that his fully conscious mind had survived the effects of prolonged semi-consciousness. His first interactions had not been amicable and might have reflected some trauma or psychosis, worse still if it had indicated an even earlier, neurological deformity. But it had not. It had only been an act of calculated malice. She wondered if that was worse.

After fifteen minutes the shower turned off of its own accord. She had fallen asleep while standing, or had lost track of time. She dried herself and exited, and on her way out she paused before the mirror. In the uncertain shadow she could well imagine that the face staring back at her was not her own.

_**streamG14-y-T28**_

_It was a big triangular room, perhaps fifty feet to a side. The door opened in one corner so that you entered staring at a wall - an expansive holographic starscape - and the old woman's desk was in the leftward corner. She watched patiently as Jonathan was led inside and the soldier shut the door behind him. She gestured for him to sit down. She looked benign. How are you feeling? Well, thank you. Your headaches have gone away. Yes Miss. Moira. Yes Moira._

_The moving image of a humanoid rose out of the table surface. It was slender and sinewy and clawed, and its body was covered in soft shiny plates. It started walking, crouching and jumping. It would break into a run and turn quickly on the spot. You know this one. Turian. Age. Late adolescent. Markings? Early hegemony, pax pattern. Indicate vulnerabilities, both classic and idiosyncratic. He paused the image and highlighted several points on the humanoid's body. Good. What are the thirteen most efficient ways to neutralise this target?_

_**analysisG14-y-T28**_

_Her?_

_Moira Dumitrescu. I'd thought she was already dead by then._

_And now?_

_Now I've got no idea._

_She's training him. For black-ops? At fifteen?_

_They started the training long before that._

_On Earth?_

_On Earth._

_I don't follow._

_Of course you don't._

**Wizening**

Shepard wasn't strong enough to walk. Gentle plastic arms lifted him from the now fluidless pod, dressed him in a medical gown and lowered him into the soft mobile chair. He was then wheeled into an adjoining room where the lights were low and the air was warm. There was a single chair, and a small mahogany table with a pair of tall china cups and a jug of some faintly sweet sky-blue liquid. There was also the faintest sound of breaking waves, or the now-forgotten song of rumbling automobiles.

Miranda sat opposite Shepard and he squinted at her with the same dispassionate regard that had been his sole expression since he'd first awoken. She was understandably wary of this. He hadn't been violent in any way since the first incident, but that attack hadn't been presaged by any behavioural signatures. Any further aggression would be just as unpredictable. And now she was alone with him.

"You know my name by now. Would you please tell me yours."

"Jonathan Fawkes Shepard." His voice was quiet, but very clear.

"And would you please state my name."

"Officer Miranda Lawson."

"Good. Do you remember how you got into this room?

"I was conveyed by an assistant."

"Please describe the assistant."

"Female, five foot four, brown eyes, sclera reddened by sleep-deprivation, heavy mascara, cosmetic bindi jewel on forehead, light-olive complexion, manicured burgundy nails, minor ventilation-spore scarring beneath left ear-" He paused. His eyes hadn't wavered. Perhaps there was a trace of amusement at their corners. "Shall I go on?"

"No, that was fine, thank you. Do you remember how you arrived in the previous room?"

"That would be impossible. Prior my awakening I had been dead."

"How do you know that?"

"I bled out in deep space. I drowned in my blood. I died."

Miranda nodded. His eyes were piercing. Without stirring, without the subtlest saccade, they seemed to scrutinise her, to take in the whole of her. It reminded her of a dissection.

"Do you want to know what it was like?"

"Pardon?"

He raised his brow. "Do you want to know what it was like to die."

Miranda stared blankly.

"It's surprising," he said, before she could decide whether he was in fact threatening to kill her. "Dying is surprising." He leant forward now, with visible awkwardness given his physical frailty, but also with an obvious enthusiasm. "I'd lived my entire - no, that's not fair - almost my entire life with the constant threat of death and yet..."

He glanced at her throat. He considered it. "Do your records tell you how many people I have killed?" It sounded like a genuine question.

"Personally?"

"Personally."

"No specific figure, but it's in the hundreds."

"Hundreds?" He looked mildly surprised, though not, it appeared, at the size of the number. She'd somehow answered an entirely different question, one she hadn't realised he was asking. He reclined again. "As I said. I've lived with the constant threat of death... but with no actual _sense_ of my own mortality."

"I understand."

"So it was surprising." His eyes flickered upward, once more confronting her own.

They were quiet for a little while. Miranda's mind raced in search of a stratagem whereby she might secure some new leverage, but before long Shepard spoke again. "The two assistants. The injured ones."

"Liam Sharpe and Coraline Tiller."

"Sharpe and Tiller, yes."

"Sharpe sustained a minor concussion and a fractured jaw, and his tongue was partially severed." Then she added, in a conciliatory gesture which she couldn't possibly justify: "Nothing a little surgery didn't put right."

"Ah."

"As for Tiller-"

"I hope she doesn't harbour any resentment." He _sounded_ perfectly sincere. He blinked.

"She's walking. But recovery is slow."

"Recovering aboard this vessel?"

"Officer Tiller is a crucial member of Operation Lazarus. Without her we'd never have succeeded in reviving you."

"Oh dear," Shepard said. He squeezed his chin between thumb and forefinger. "I've been less than appreciative." Something like a genuine smile was playing across his colourless lips. Miranda decided it was an olive branch.

"She fought hard to get on incubation duty. You were - still are - a hero to many of us."

"That gives me plenty to think about."

"I suppose it does."

"Perhaps I might do so in my personal quarters?" He looked at the door expectantly, seemingly having lost interest in Miranda. Defeated, she summoned Itkila with a keystroke and rose to her feet when the young woman entered.

As Shepard was wheeled out of the room he placed a gentle hand upon Itkila's, motioning her to stop. "Lazarus," he said, not looking back. "That was the name of the revivification project?"

"That's right," Miranda replied.

"Right. Then I suppose that would make you the Nazarene?" If that last remark was meant to be a joke, Miranda certainly didn't get it.

Shepard withdrew his hand from Itkila's in a soft caress; the woman stiffened momentarily. They rolled out of the room and the door whirred shut behind them.

_**streamI6-s-P45**_

_On the holoscreen they marched the man onto the stage, beneath the looming Alliance flag, and tethered him to the chair. He struggled and kicked and probably screamed mama! and help me god! but there weren't any words and Jonathan could only guess. There were rows and rows of seated men and women in all sorts of official dress. A woman came and stood beside the struggling man and spoke for a while, first to the crowd and then to the man. He was slowly calming. His chest shrank and bloomed as though a creature interred within was testing the limits of his flesh. At last the woman stopped. A light beside the man's head flashed for two seconds and he stopped moving. Then the chair unfolded, the back of it lowering as its front raised, and it became a gurney. They wheeled the man away._

_The holoscreen powered down and the door behind it opened. Reece walked in, broad and bald and looming, and behind him two soldiers carried the unconscious man Jon had just seen on the screen. They shackled him to a ceiling fixture and left him to dangle while Reece came over and put the knife in Jon's hand. One of the soldiers slapped the man awake. Morning, sunshine. The man's eyes opened sluggishly. No. No no no no no. Reece smiled open-mouthed. He had a fat, dark tongue like a cobra's head. Yes. No, you already killed me. I'm dead. They killed you, August, but we haven't yet had the pleasure. I think we're more deserving, don't you? Reece looked expectantly at Jon. No ceremony, Shepard. Just make it count._

_**analysisI6-s-P45**_

_God._

_You don't know the half of it._

_I mean- we've all seen the footage. Every student of politics, of history, every Alliance serviceperson..._

_The death of August Molina._

_It's beyond bizarre._

_No. It makes perfect sense._

_Glad someone understands it._

_To the Alliance Molina was a monster. He represented... well, we all know what he represented._

_But to Covenant he was something else?_

_Yes. Or at least to Meschia. Don't bother asking what. I've got no idea._

**Wallowing**

Sleep is a great speaker of human truth, for in its there is no possibility of concealment, of measured gestures, of restraint. The sleeping self is another self and often traitor to one's waking cause.

In her life Miranda had only watched three men sleep. She'd watched her father, so often slumped over a terminal, or even standing, even dozing in mid-step with his chin upon his chest and a drizzle of spit pooled in the tangle of his black beard. Even in sleep he schemed. He muttered. He spluttered code and self-posed questions. Often when he woke it was with the answer to the very puzzle that had tired him beyond exhaustion. His sleep was... efficient.

In later nights, on this night, she watched Jacob Taylor. He dreamed deeply. His sleep was his stillness and in his embrace she could feel sure that she would always wake enfolded as before. He often smiled, sometimes he murmured quietly. Twice she saw him weep as if at some inward tragedy. Tonight he was peaceful. She didn't want to trouble him with her own fiftul rest, which she felt sure would wake him, so she waited until he was comfortably settled and slipped out of the bed.

She went to the toilet, put on her uniform, brushed her hair and drank some water. Then she exited his quarters and made the long walk to the observation room.

There were only thirty-four personnel in the research facility, though it had room and resources for at least two-hundred. Its hallways, painted in creams and gentle pastels, arced in delicate concentric curves, and in lieu of conventional stairways there were many broadly spiralling ramps and domed elevators whose holographic walls depicted gardens and other fertile places. It wasn't a very human sort of station. It was modelled after the asari, who better understand the calm and peace which inquisitiveness requires. No-one was in the hallways. The facility had no official day and night, nor any permissible means of modulating ambient light levels in the common areas, so they were as bright and warm as ever, but the staff had decided by some unspoken consensus that the present hour would be an hour of quiet.

Wilson was at his familiar spot by the primary monitor where the data from Shepard's regulatory nanite relay was displayed. His eyes were wide and alert. His posture, as always, was slackened and unenthused, and he didn't straighten at all when she entered. When they'd first met she would have called him insubordinate.

He gestured toward the secondary monitor where the sleeping Commander was visible in his complete and naked glory. "The machine is still offline."

Shepard slept like the dead, in the truest sense of the word. He never covered himself with his sheets (or, for that matter, with clothes) and he always slept on his back with his arms at his sides. His breathing was so slow, so long, that you only noticed it if you were deliberately watching. Miranda's own morbid sensibility had compared him to a corpse. Wilson, a great lover of electronics and artificial intelligences, preferred to think of him as hardware.

"I only just started, you know," Wilson said.

"I'm just checking in," Miranda replied. She looked at his coffee mug. "More of that?" Wilson nodded.

She walked over to the pot. It was fresh and almost full and its smelled delicious. She remembered that she was supposed to be sleeping but she poured a cup anyway so that she wouldn't look like an idiot.

"Anything unusual?" she asked.

"I'd have told you, rightaway." Wilson's tone suggested otherwise.

"The last summary said he experienced an EFE spike in the early hypnopompic. Did we follow it up?"

"Of course. Wasn't anything. Dream. Nightmare maybe."

"Did the module catch it?"

"If it was recall, yeah."

"You didn't check to make sure?"

"That's not my job."

Miranda began an acerbic reply, then stopped and revised it in her head. "Management of all input-output _is_ your responsibility. We have to-"

"_Nanite_ relay, and our _own_ sensors, are my responsibility. Xenotech isn't." He pointed at the tertiary monitor. "_That_ isn't. I don't understand half that shit."

Brusque and confrontational as he was, Wilson was right. His training and assignment made no provision for memory retrieval. He hadn't known the technology was possible until the Illusive Man decided to introduce it during late gestation phase. He turned away again.

Miranda sat down at the tertiary console and cursed under her breath. There were six new recall clusters, almost four full petabytes of data since the previous summary.

"How much sleep has he had?"

"Half an hour."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course." Wilson scowled at her.

She called up her Omnitool console and initiated the offship data transfer. "General brain activity?"

"Pretty... general."

She glared. "Don't fuck around."

"Seriously Miranda there's nothing unusual in his brain activity. He's asleep, he isn't dreaming, he-"

"The module's been taking something significant. Watch the monitor and don't leave this room." She grabbed her cup and swallowed its contents. In seconds she was out the door and Wilson was alone again.

He waited two full minutes then stood up and walked over to the tertiary console. He brought up his own Tool's bypass interface, keyed in the password, then the override, and selected: PURGE. He walked back to the primary console, cancelled the current screen and activated another.

The facility only contained thirty-four of its possible two hundred researchers. Its contingent of five hundred LOKI mechs was at full strength. The screen contained the words CURRENTLY OFFLINE. He confirmed his selection then sagged into his comfortable seat again and sipped his cooling coffee.

_**streamP1-b-V09**_

_All around them was the whistle and snap and caustic splash of pistol fire. Jonathan followed Reece up the stairs, keeping close to the wall as he was instructed. Reece leaned around the corner, fired two shots, nodded at Jon. They moved into the next hallway where two women were slumped unceremoniously against the far wall with neat little holes between their eyes. Next one's yours, John. I can hear them already. Reece disappeared into a side room._

_Jon fell against a wall and clutched his side and scrunched up his face in a grimace of pain. Three soldiers came through the far door. Good God, cadet, you been shot? He nodded, didn't speak, waited for them to draw closer. When the closest one was five yards away Jon sent a jolt of force into his gut and flung him back into the others. He walked up to each of them and shot them once between the eyes and twice in the chest before they could regain their senses. Reece came out of the sideroom and kept moving forward. Shepard followed._

_**analysisP1-b-V09**_

_-file missing-_

**Wondering**

His body was far from fully recovered but he had of course planned for this. He slipped or slithered from his bed into the deepest shadow of the room. There was an ever-loudening chorus of footsteps in the hallway outside. Synthetic-soled. Even strides. Mechs. Of course. _It's been far too long,_ Jon thought. _Far, far too long._

**Wandering**

It isn't the sound of gunfire that stirs a sleeping soldier from his reverie, but the wails of the maimed, and sometimes even their muted, bewildered grunts as the plasma gnaws away their throat or lungs. The ordnance itself is eerily quiet, often no more than a hiss, so that in the midst of battle fully joined it is the pain and the protest that one hears, not the meagre mutterings of machine-guns.

Jacob had been woken by the noise of conflict many times. Once, while he dreamed a conversation in the gardens of the Presidium with a woman whose name and face he can't remember, he found her voice transfigured to the shrieking of a child. Waking then, he discovered that it was his comrade who was screaming for his body had been half blown away, but the beam that had all but bisected him had hardly made a sound.

This time he was not sure that he had fallen asleep at all. Miranda had thought him sleeping when he was only resting, and he had heard all of her movements in his quarters and then her surreptitious exit, but how much time had passed between her disappearance and the first shout? He pulled on his pants, retrieved his pistol from the bedside compartment and moved to the door. He listened. There was a quiet, struggling movement on the other side. A gurgle, perhaps, and the familiar chirp of a service pistol, then silence.

The faint red light of the door's security pad flashed green and the door opened. A LOKI stepped briskly inside: short-statured, slender and shining in the sudden light. Jacob levelled the pistol, shot it in the head, leaned out, shot two more, then ducked back. Two left. There was chirping again, distant this time, and the clatter of two more falling metal bodies.

"Taylor." Miranda's restrained voice.

Jacob breathed in relief. "Lawson."

"It's clear."

"Same here."

Miranda stepped into the doorway, only glancing at Jacob to note that he was still half-dressed, and turned to cover the hallway. "Get your kit." He did so.

"Hell's going on?"

"The whole SE's been compromised. The LOKIs are massacring the personnel."

"How'd we get hacked?" He secured the final brace of his Omnitool and was ready.

"Carlon fucking Wilson." She spat the name.

"Wilson. Why the hell would he-"

"He's a piece of shit, that's why." In truth she had no idea why Wilson might have turned traitor. He had the know-how, but she couldn't imagine a motive. _Other than he's a piece of shit._ Jacob simply nodded.

"Who else is up and able?"

"Saw Crozier and three others in F Sector but I was cut off. They'll be heading for the pods, but they're useless now."

"Right. The shuttle then."

"Not yet."

Jacob swore. He'd completely forgotten about Shepard. Of course, he'd never so much as glimpsed the man since the Lazarus Project was underway. "Where is he?"

"You needn't worry about Shepard." A cool, almost sardonic voice.

"Commander, is that you?" Miranda diverted the audio from her Tool to her comm and Jacob synched frequencies.

Shepard ignored the question. "Why are you stationary?"

"We're-"

"We're moving now Shepard," Jacob interrupted.

They moved.

_**streamW5-h-R80**_

_Lawson was a spectacular shot, but she wasn't a soldier. There was too much reflex in her motion. Taylor kept a few paces ahead of her, sometimes leaving an open sight and sometimes providing cover with his own body. Jonathan decided that they were lovers. He guided them by radio down side corridors and winding, counterintuitive paths. They crept past a patrol of thirty active LOKIs that fired at Itkila as she ran along a distant intersection. They grimaced as she screamed for a long time even though the LOKIs kept on shooting and shooting. I can't fly the shuttle on my own. Don't martyr yourself on anyone's account._

_They trod over great wastelands of hallway, where sundered mechs twitched from wall to wall and raised malicious hemispherical eyes from useless bodies to glare at them as they passed. Shepard, did you clear a path for us? I cleared a path for me. You're just following after. Most of the resistance was in the corridors immediately preceding the shuttle bay. There were a dozen inert LOKIs but many more were marching or waiting near the doors. Take a vac helmet from the wall. Retreat to hallway E6 and wait for the signal. What's the signal? Jonathan laughed._

**Weeping**

The charges detonated in a violent violet spark that filled the passageway with heat and turned the sentries into a billowing cloud of glass and plastic and steel. It was very quiet now.

"Commander?" said Miranda

"Get inside."

They moved quickly through the slowly settling cloud with the sound of more approaching mechs behind them. There were two shuttles in the small bay and it was obvious that one of them, its navigational array exposed and half excised, wasn't going anywhere. The other shuttle's accessway was open and they entered it as the bay's airlock groaned shut behind them.

Shepard and Wilson were both seated there. Wilson was wheezing, red-faced, with a patch of blood spreading on his belly. Miranda stepped back and raised her pistol. "What's he doing here?"

Shepard frowned at her. "Don't be hasty. Taylor, take the controls."

Jacob moved past them to the cockpit and buckled himself in. Coordinates were already displayed onscreen, but he didn't recognise them.

"Ignore those. Set whatever course you like." Shepard motioned for Miranda to sit, then gave Wilson a significant look. "Are you going to answer her question?" Instead of responding, Wilson doubled over and spat a gobbet of blood onto the floor. Shepard shrugged. He shoved Wilson off the seat with visible effort and the dying man fell to his knees, facing the still-open accessway.

Shepard extended his upturned palm towards Miranda. "Pistol, please."

She knew immediately what he intended. She holstered her pistol. "He isn't going anywhere."

"No. He's not." Shepard kept his cold and brilliant eyes fixed on hers. His hand was still extended. She glared back.

At last he sighed, turned to Wilson one last time with an expression of deep consideration, and inhaled sharply. Wilson's whole body contorted in numerous obscene directions, then rolled through the accessway and tumbled out of sight. The door hissed shut.

"As soon as you're ready, Officer Taylor."

_**dialogue1**_

_It's been a long time._

_Surprised?_

_A little, I'll admit._

_It's good to see you, Jon._

_I'm not going back._

_Of course. You and I both know there's nothing to go back to._

_But Covenant isn't dead._

_To hell with Covenant. I didn't bring you back so I could jerk your strings like those xenos sons of bitches._

_You must have had a damned good reason all the same._

_I always do, Jon._


End file.
